Artemis 1 Orion spacecraft on track for return to Earth after moon flyby - Space.com
For NASA's Orion spacecraft, the next stop is home.The uncrewed spacecraft flying on NASA's Artemis 1 mission passed a major milestone in its mission today (Dec. 5) when it successfully performed a 207-second engine burn while just just 79 miles (128 kilometers) above the lunar surface.And in a media teleconference on Monday (Dec. 5), Orion spaceccraft mission managers asserted that so far, that's exactly how everything is going.Related: Artemis 1 Orion spacecraft completes crucial moon flyby for trip home.Mike Sarafin, Artemis mission manager at NASA Headquarters in Washington, spoke more poetically during the teleconference about the incredible feats Orion has already performed, such as breaking the human-rated spacecraft distance record previously set by Apollo 13.Mission managers also discussed a pair of anomalies the spacecraft encountered in recent days, which include a communication outage and an anomaly with a power system aboard Orion. .
Mission managers described during tonight's teleconference how a site-wide outage at the Deep Space Network site in Goldstone, California caused a four-and-a-half hour disruption in communication between ground controllers and Orion.Additionally, a power conditioning distribution unit onboard Orion malfunctioned on Sunday (Dec. 4), cutting off power to four devices responsible for the vehicle's propulsion and heating subsystems."We talked through that today, as a mission management team, and the spacecraft is fine.There's plenty of redundancy on the vehicle," Sarafin said today about the power anomaly.
Artemis 1 Orion spacecraft captures live view of Earth and moon from deep space.